The court-ordered ISP blockade of The Pirate Bay immediately backfired earlier this month when it massively raised awareness and caused the site to receive millions of extra visitors. Now, and as a direct result of the Pirate Bay ban, the website of the UK Pirate Party is benefiting hugely too. In just over three weeks it has jumped more than 100,000 places in the UK rankings and any moment now will become the 1,500th most-visited website in the country.

The Pirate Bay has suffered censorship in many countries across Europe but the recent steps against the torrent site in the UK have generated a much bigger response than similar actions previously taken against the site elsewhere.

It’s not absolutely clear why this is the case but it’s certainly possible that the cross-continent shared understanding of the English language has brought the fear of censorship closer to home for all Internet users. Whatever the reason, the kick-back has been immense.

Rather than sitting idly by, net activists all around the world have been doing their part to re-connect millions of Britains to The Pirate Bay, many by running their own proxy services. At the forefront of this effort are the UK Pirate Party.

Inspired by their Dutch counterparts who recently set up a proxy to bypass a blockade in the Netherlands, Pirate Party UK reacted similarly to the High Court-ordered ISP blockade in the UK. In parallel with the first ISP block from Virgin Media, PPUK responded by firing up their very own anti-censorship proxy.

After being mentioned dozens of times in the media and featuring in the #1 position on the PirateReverse information site, PPUK’s proxy service quickly became the weapon of choice for UK Internet users wanting to unblock the galaxy’s most-resilient torrent site.

The effect on their web presence has been nothing short of dramatic.

Although impressive, it’s worth pointing out that the graph above doesn’t tell the whole story.

Just over 3 weeks ago the Pirate Party UK website was listed way outside the top 100,000 most-visted websites in the UK. Today, as a direct result of their response to Pirate Bay censorship, the site is listed by Alexa as the UK’s 1,550th most popular website.

According to PPUK’s Harry Percival, during a single 24 hour period last week the site received more than 1.8m hits. Given the unavailability of the Pirate Bay website over the past 48 hours, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the PPUK site’s ranking has increased again.

“Whenever the government tries to break the Internet we get a massive boost,” PPUK Culture & Media spokesperson Andrew Robinson told TorrentFreak.

“Whether it’s the PirateBay blocking, the CCDP snooper’s charter, or the latest idea for a porn morality filter, it seems like traditional parties just don’t get it – and people are starting to realize that you can’t just ignore this stuff, it really does have an impact on freedoms, civil liberties and innovation. That’s why the Pirates, both here in the UK and worldwide, are attracting more and more support.

“Another way of looking at it is: the BPI’s high court action has sent a very clear message to politicians of all parties: Voters love file sharing. If you want to be massively popular, you should support file sharing too,” Robinson concludes.

The big question is what happens next. Just over the North Sea in the Netherlands Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN obtained a far-reaching court ruling which banned the Dutch Pirate Party from not only running a proxy, but also telling people where to go to unblock Pirate Bay.

Will the members of the BPI, the companies behind the UK block, go back to court in an effort to silence the Pirates? That’s certainly a possibility but even if they were successful, given the response to censorship thus far there are plenty of people prepared to take up the slack.